Posts tagged: occultism

One of the conspicuous features of the coronavirus pandemic is how little control we have over the situation.

We’re facing a novel virus, one which has never infected human beings before. We have no vaccine. We have no treatments.

The one non-pharmacological intervention we do have—social distancing—is leaving a lot of people feeling powerless. They can’t engage in the activities that bring them pleasure. They can leave their houses only sparingly. All we’re left to do now is wait, and that can feel disempowering.

But even in situations that feel disempowering, we are duty-bound to understand circumstances as best we can and to bring them under our control.

Learn to understand clearly how best to manipulate the energies which you control to obtain the results most favourable to it from its relations with the part of the Universe which you do not yet control. Extend the dominion of your consciousness, and its control of all forces alien to it, to the utmost. Do this by the ever stronger and more skilful application of your faculties to the finer, clearer, fuller, and more accurate perception, the better understanding, and the more wisely ordered government, of that external Universe.

—Aleister Crowley, “Duty”

If you’re not a virologist or a physician, chances are it may feel as though there is very little to exert your control over. But times like this, when so much control has been taken away, it makes sense to concentrate on those things over which we still do have some or even complete control. One of those things is our dwellings.

As I said in my recent video, in order to keep your body safe, you need to keep the virus out of your home. Another way of saying this is that you must expand your sense of self so that it also includes the place where you dwell.

This is not a dimension of doing one’s will that should be taken lightly in any case. Commenting on the Magus card in the Book of Thoth, Crowley says:

This card therefore represents the Wisdom, the Will, the Word, the Logos by whom the worlds were created. (See the Gospel according to St. John, chapter I.) It represents the Will. In brief, he is the Son, the manifestation in act of the idea of the Father. He is the male correlative of the High Priestess. Let there be no confusion here on account of the fundamental doctrine of the Sun and Moon as the Second Harmonics to the Lingam and the Yoni; for, as will be seen in the citation from The Paris Working, (see Appendix) the creative Mercury is of the nature of the Sun.  But Mercury is the Path leading from Kether to Binah, the Understanding; and thus He is the messenger of the gods, represents precisely that Lingam, the Word of creation whose speech is silence.

Here we find Crowley binding together several concepts:

1. The will (the central theme of the spiritual system of Thelema).
2. The Son, which as part of the Holy Trinity represents the manifestation in act of the idea of the Father. Crowley here explicitly references John I where we read,
   
   “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”
   
   In other words the Son—and hence the will—is not to be thought of as just a particular person (say, Jesus of Nazareth) but something more akin to the invariant structure of the cosmos. It is that act of the Father (the principle of consciousness) whereby the universe becomes intelligible.
3. To say that the Son renders the universe intelligible to us is to say that it is by virtue of the Son that the universe is anything at all to a consciousness like ours. It is that which allows things to be what they are, to shine forth as phenomena in their own right. Thus the creative Mercury or Son is of the nature of the Sun (that by means of which the sensible is made sensible).
4. This relationship between manifestation or shining forth and speech or the Word is given in the Greek word, logos. Logos is related to légō, which means “I put in order, arrange, gather.” Logos or the Son is the speech that gathers, and by gathering things marshals them forth into visibility.
5. “But Mercury is the Path leading from Kether to Binah, the Understanding”. In other words, it is attributed to the path of ב or Bet.
   
   Bet means house.

Tying this complex strand of ideas together we might say that the Magus or the magician is that individual whose characteristic mode of action is to call beings forth into the light so that they may be what they are and understood as they are. The magician accomplishes this by “speaking” a certain way, by gathering them and showing them. And this mode of speech—this evocation—is intimately tied up with houses, with a particular mode of dwelling on the face of the Earth.

In other words, magic is the transformation of nature into a home. As God the Father speaks nature into intelligible existence by calling it forth into his own radiance, so do we make our lives meaningful when we order the circumstances we find ourselves in in such a way as to suit our own purposes.

Thus Magick is the Science and art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will.

God the Father in manifestation is the Sun, Tiphareth. The Light or Speech given off by the Father—the Son—is Mercury, Hod. This Speech returns to the Father by means of the Holy Spirit, symbolized by the dove which is Venus or Netzach. It issues back into the House of the Sun, Tiphareth, whose meaning in English is beauty.

This is why the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel (i.e., the Holy Spirit) results in the beatific vision. This is a vision of the oneness, beauty, and effulgence of all things, which Crowley also equates with atmadarshana.

The three paths connecting Tiphareth, Hod, and Netzach—Ayin, Peh, and Nun—add up to 200, the enumeration of Resh, which means head. The card The Sun is attributed to the path of Resh on the Tree of Life.

But from a microcosmic point of view, we might say that we imitate the act of the Father when we dwell in our abodes in a way which is beautiful. It is not the purely instrumental act of dwelling which matters so much as the excessive and playful mode of dwelling—dwelling for its own sake, i.e., aesthetic enjoyment.

Thus Crowley also says of magick that it is the Art of Life Itself.

So if you’re looking to perform magick in the face of the coronavirus pandemic you might try two things:

1. Expand your sense of self to fill the place where you currently live. Get to know every little nook and cranny of the physical building you occupy. Purge it of everything alien. Rearrange it—speak order into it—so that it reflects as closely as possible the divine order, i.e., consecrate it to the accomplishment of your will.
2. Beautify it to the extent you can. Don’t just be stuck here. Make sure what you see when you open your eyes every day is what you want to see. Think of your home as the House of the Sun, i.e., Tiphareth. The House of God is the beautiful house. Make sure it remains that way.